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Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?

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Re: Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?

#51

Google acquiring YouTube "In the Plex" by Steven Levy goes into great detail on how YouTube could not survive its growth without the infrastructure and ad technologies Google brought to the platform.

That's an argument for the acquisition of YT by Google being net positive, but it doesn't answer the OP's question, which he specifically restricts to the "less tangible parts of the smaller company".

Re: Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?

#52

Amazon owns the following companies selling books: - AbeBooks (acquired by Amazon in 2008) - Book Depository (acquired by Amazon in 2011) These companies don't appeared to have changed dramatically from when Amazon bought them. I wonder if these companies operate 'independently' without too much undue influence from Amazon?

You left out Amazing acquiring IMDB in 1998! Hasn't changed much since then. Likewise woot.com in 2010.

Re: Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?

#53
post #44
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coco was excellent. But agreed on the rest.

Ah. Might have to watch it then. After a number of duds I gave up on watching new Pixar movies except for those made by Brad Bird, or especially recommended.

Coco and Turning Red were excellent. The rest of your list however, proves you more right than wrong.

Re: Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?

#54
post #44
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coco was excellent. But agreed on the rest.

Ah. Might have to watch it then. After a number of duds I gave up on watching new Pixar movies except for those made by Brad Bird, or especially recommended.

My whole family enjoyed Luca FWIW.

Re: Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?

#55
post #33
post #12

Oracle acquiring Sun. I know there is a lot of Oracle hate but: MySQL, GraalVM (Java), Sun hardware (both Exa* and SPARC), VirtualBox and many more technologies are better today than prior. The challenge Sun would have had, regardless of Oracle or not, is that they were solidly in the On-Prem business ... and the market has moved to Cloud.

Even on the remaining on-prem market, who's still using MySQL over MariaDB or Postgres? Who's using SPARC over X64? Who's using Virtualbox over HyperV, Libvirt or VMWare?

Enough people so that it's profitable.

Re: Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?

#58
I don't know what it's like from the inside, but from the outside the acquisition of Oculus by Facebook has gone much better than I expected. I really thought Oculus would be gone within a year, but they've continued to put out some great products. Other than the misstep about requiring Facebook accounts, it seems like a success.

Re: Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?

#60

Google acquiring YouTube "In the Plex" by Steven Levy goes into great detail on how YouTube could not survive its growth without the infrastructure and ad technologies Google brought to the platform.

Also Android.
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